Microsoft CEO Nadella Touts New Opportunities to Lead

By Dina Bass and Brian Womack -
May 28, 2014

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) Chief Executive
Officer Satya Nadella said he will seek to focus on businesses
where the company can lead, rather than harp on missed
opportunities in areas like tablet computers and hardware.

“The question is, what is the next thing that is going to
make us better?” Nadella said in a keynote interview yesterday
at Re/code’s Code conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.
“It’s the hunt for what is it that is the inflection point that
matters more than what caused us to miss.”

In Nadella’s first public interview since replacing Steve Ballmer as CEO in February, he also said he doesn’t plan to
change Microsoft’s plans for Xbox or sell off the Bing search
engine. The company will continue to span both enterprise and
consumer markets, he said. He highlighted Microsoft’s focus on
products that run on any device, as well as the areas of Web-based cloud computing, mobile and business software.

As part of that effort, the Redmond, Washington-based
company also used the conference to unveil a new Skype product
that translates Web-conference conversations in real time. Set
for a test release later this year, the Skype translator was
demonstrated in a conversation between Gurdeep Singh Pall, who
oversees Skype, and a German speaker. The product provides both
a spoken and text translation and will initially be available as
a stand-alone offering before being combined into the Skype
application.

‘Global Product’

“Skype is a very global product -- it’s all about
connecting people that are separated by distance,” Pall said in
an interview. “One of the biggest barriers that still remains
is really the language barrier.”

Microsoft isn’t sure how many languages will be included
initially, Pall said. The company will release new languages as
they meet the bar for translation quality.

The software relies on work by Microsoft’s research arm, as
well as the Bing search unit, which has its own translation
product for Web pages and Internet content, he said. The Skype
service needs to use speech recognition to understand the
speaker, machine learning for the translation, and text-to-speech technology to send the translation to the listener.

Since taking over, Nadella has sought to focus the world’s
largest software maker on mobile and cloud products. He has
signaled a desire to shift attention to producing software for
rival operating systems like Apple Inc.’s iOS and Google Inc.’s
Android and has shuffled management in areas like marketing,
business development and the Xbox game console.

Tablet Event

A company event earlier this month to release a new Surface
tablet was noteworthy for what the CEO chose not to unveil.
While Microsoft showed a larger model of its Surface Pro, a
planned smaller tablet failed to meet with the approval of
Nadella and his executives and was pulled from the event, people
familiar with the matter said last week.

At the session in New York, Nadella didn’t discuss the
missing device and noted that Microsoft won’t seek to develop
hardware to compete with its partners and will instead focus on
areas where it can develop something unique. His comments
suggest a more selective approach to building devices rather
than going for the largest number of offerings.